


Transmission Received

by strangeispowerful



Series: ~*Superpowers AU Oneshots*~ [10]
Category: Dear Evan Hansen - Pasek & Paul/Levenson
Genre: Alternate Universe - Everyone Lives/Nobody Dies, Alternate Universe - Small Town, Alternate Universe - Superheroes/Superpowers, Aquariums, Character Study, Evan Hansen & Jared Kleinman Friendship, Evan Hansen is So Very Very Lost, Evan Hansen is an Empath, Introspection, M/M, Mild Angst, Multi, One Shot Collection, Pining Jared Kleinman, no beta we die like men
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-25
Updated: 2020-06-25
Packaged: 2021-03-04 01:53:57
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,289
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24915685
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/strangeispowerful/pseuds/strangeispowerful
Summary: As far as Evan knows, there are three rules corresponding to his being an empath. He’s sure there must be more, because stuff like this is usually infinitely complicated, but, since these are the only ones that he’s really pieced together, they’re all he worries about.Or: The endless struggle of 'are the feelings I'm catching even mine?'
Relationships: Alana Beck & Evan Hansen, Alana Beck & Jared Kleinman, Evan Hansen & Jared Kleinman, Evan Hansen/Jared Kleinman
Series: ~*Superpowers AU Oneshots*~ [10]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1750975
Comments: 6
Kudos: 48





	Transmission Received

**Author's Note:**

> It's kind of been a while! What's up? I've been focusing a lot on my current multi-chapter story, as well as a not-so-slow induction into the Be More Chill fandom, so I haven't found much time to write! Anyways, this a bit more of a character-study centered one shot and will focus on Evan's empathic ability. tw for mentions of a panic attack, though it's nothing too severe.

As far as Evan knows, there are three rules corresponding to his being an empath. He’s sure there must be more, because stuff like this is usually infinitely complicated, but, since these are the only ones that he’s really pieced together, they’re all he worries about.

He’s standing in the dark hallway of the jellyfish exhibit at the Aquarium, the huge sheet of rounded glass in front of him casting a blue glow throughout the shadowed room. Gently, he puts a hand to the glass, careful not to accidentally tap it with a fingernail or something else that might disturb the jellies—he does this sometimes, stops by, especially on days when Alana’s working, just to say hi. 

But it’s more than that, too. There’s something deeply surreal about the movement of the creatures behind a pane of glass. Evan, more often than he’d like to admit, feels like _he’s_ behind a pane of glass, too. So maybe there’s a kinship there.

Mostly, though, he likes to be around them because, being in the safe, controlled environment of the aquarium, they’re always calm.

That’s rule number one: Evan’s sensing abilities aren’t only restricted to humans. This is one of the reasons that he hates the Zoo in the city. It puts up a clean facade, but he can tell from the pounding in his head and the crushing, overcoming _restlessness_ that those animals are _not_ being treated well.

The Aquarium’s different. Alana, and the other staff members too, he assumes, he hasn’t really met them, are incredibly conscientious with the animals. Because standing alone in that dark room, with all the buzz of human emotion faded out behind him, Evan finally gets a _break._

All he can feel is the warm glass beneath his palm, the calm, rippling sway of the creature’s emotions. His _own_ emotions, which, half the time, seem so far away and foggy that, in moments like this, he feels as if he’s floating.

He closes his eyes.

_What do you feel?_

The memory comes to him slowly, just the voices, first, and then the faint view of the room, and then the smell of the antiseptic.

 _Loud,_ he’d said, because _of course_ , how else could he explain it? His mother had gotten him an appointment with the pediatrician after his third meltdown in a week in the elementary school cafeteria for seemingly no reason. The doctor, one of the good ones from what Evan can remember, had astutely suspected that there was an emotional component.

He was six. He was nervous too, clutching his mother and trying to drown himself in the warm, loving emotion pulsing out of her.

But he felt everything else, too. The kid in the room next door, panicking because they didn’t want to get a shot. The mother in tears across the hallway because her child must have been diagnosed with something. Someone upstairs, overcome with joy that _it’s a girl!_ And it was deafening.

_It’s too loud._

Neither the doctor nor his mother could coax anything out of him after that, but the pediatrician had suggested a mild anxiety medication, which became decidedly less mild as he got older, and then a therapist when he started middle school.

By then, he had learned to handle it better. And the medication _did_ help. The only problem was that it only really faded _his_ anxiety, and did nothing to combat the panic and angst and anger and love and confusion pouring off of his pubescent classmates.

Christ, middle school had been hard. Thank _god_ for Jared.

Jared was an anchor, mostly because he was, yeah, insecure, but not as wildly flailing as everyone else. He was quiet about it. He put up a front, but Evan knew what was really going on, and Evan was quiet too. It was nice to each lunch with someone else in the library. And when Jared found out about Evan’s plant affinity, he’d developed a protective side over his friend that was strangely endearing and that he was deeply thankful for.

Though, Evan kept the empathic thing to himself. It was too hard to explain, and he didn’t want to complicate their friendship, especially when Jared just thought he was the best-friend and partner-in-(not)-crime to a super neurotic and shy _superhero_ kid. How weird could Evan _be?_

And then silence, back in the Aquarium exhibit. So deep and lovely that Evan’s scared he’ll fall asleep standing up—how embarrassing would that be, to have one of Alana’s co-workers find him snoring in front of the jellyfish?

Evan opens his eyes to the aquamarine tank in front of him and turns his head to see a jellyfish slowly floating by, snow-white tendrils wispy like lace in the water. 

The memories of his childhood fade a little bit, and he’s just left with himself.

 _Maybe that’s what I’m scared of,_ he thinks, anticipating the overgrowth of emotion that he’ll have to deal with once he leaves the room. _That I’m not even myself. That I’m so full of other people’s feelings that I have none for myself._

He can’t even _imagine_ life without the empathic ability. It’d be like learning a new language, every conversation like stepping blindly into the road and without knowing whether or not there’s oncoming traffic. Like floating in the middle of the ocean with no land in sight.

Because all that he feels now is calm, right? Or is he just hollow. Maybe he’s been mistaking emptiness for calm all of this time.

Rule number two: Just because you can feel other people's emotions 24/7 doesn't make you any more emotionally strong _or_ independent.

When Evan was a freshman, he went to the bathroom at the beginning of lunch to change out of his gym clothes. Halfway through pulling his t-shirt back over his head, someone stumbled into the bathroom, locked them-self in another stall, and was silent.

It was clear from the moment the door opened that they were having a panic attack.

Evan, being Evan, didn’t know what to do. He didn’t want to leave the bathroom and announce his presence, because what if the person thought he was just ignoring them? But he couldn’t stay, because the panic was starting to filter into him, and soon his heart was pounding and his pulse was fluttering and the fluorescent lights above were _buzzzzz_ ing in his ears, and he just had to sit down on the floor and try to hyperventilate as quietly as possible because that’s just what you do. 

Evan missed lunch. He showed up to third period in a t-shirt and his gym sweats, feeling pale and exhausted. Jared had noticed—they had second period together throughout the ninth grade, and sat at lunch with Zoe and Connor. But the faint worry bouncing off of him only did the more to tire him out.

So it’d been clear that there was only one way to go about the sensory overload—find a way to deal with it. 

His first line of defense is to put as much distance between him and the other person as possible. It seems like his range of emotion sensing is, he guesses, around forty-five feet. Enough that, sitting on a bus, he can sense everyone else riding it. 

But if he can’t get away, like, if he’s _on a bus,_ or in an elevator, or whatever else may happen, his second and most important tactic is music.

For his birthday, he bought himself a pair of ridiculously expensive and ridiculously good-quality headphones, and though the sound of the music doesn’t block out the emotions he feels, it draws his _own_ emotions to the surface, and he’s able to overpower the others, in a way. 

It’s a good, but flawed tactic. Especially because, by universal law, all of the horrible songs on a shuffled playlist play first, and he’s too nervous to buy Spotify Premium because it charges automatically, and it makes him kind of anxious to know that nine dollars and ninety-nine cents will be deducted monthly without him consenting for the five-hundredth time. 

Anyways. 

There’s a sudden feeling to the left of him, and Evan recognizes it immediately—emotion sensing is kind of like a fingerprint, he thinks. He can recognize who someone is just by their empathic signature and nothing else. He knows that it’s Jared before he even speaks up.

“You know, jellyfish are like, ninety-five percent water?”

Evan turns, smiles at the familiar face of his closest friend. “Hey.”

Jared comes up next to him in the hallway, leaning with his back against the glass and crossing his arms. “So, you just hangin’ with the fishes?”

“For someone who just spouted a totally Alana-given jellyfish fact at me, you should know by now that jellyfish aren’t fish.”

He purses his lips. “That… makes no sense, but okay.”

“Are they really ninety-five percent?”

“You were right. That’s what Alana said.”

Evan pivots away from the tank to lean his back against it as well and looks at his friend. The otherworldly ocean-glow of the tanks set his face in a turquoise glow, reflecting off of his glasses. “I just came to… I don’t know. For the quiet.” He swallows. “Why’re you here?”

“I’m helping Alana with coding stuff. She has a break at two and she wants me to teach her how to redesign the Aquarium website.”

“Don’t they just use, like, Wix, or something?”

Jared shrugs. “That’s what I said. Guess not. And she wants ‘hands on experience’ or whatever.” He puts air quotes around the words, but not in a way that seems annoyed, just playful. “I said she’s a smart enough girl, she can figure it out. She baited me with a box of Pocky.”

Evan grins and shakes his head. “Sounds about right.”

“And what is that supposed to mean?” Jared scoffs and looks at Evan, giving him an amused look. The light really is strong; he kind of looks like he’s from that movie, Avatar, Evan thinks. And then he feels that pulling, flickering, fluttering in his chest and winces a little.

Rule number three: There’s nothing Evan can really do about the physical manifestations of other people’s emotions.

Evan has done a lot of research. He has spent hours on scientific websites, studies on human behavior, checked out encyclopedias from the public library, the works. In the most clean-cut way to say it, emotions are linked closely to chemical activity in the brain. So levels of serotonin have to do with happiness, and etcetera.

He doesn’t understand how the receiving of the emotions works, though he’s always theorized that he’s kind of like a radio that’s tuned to two stations at once. Everything gives off vibrations and frequencies, right? Like light waves being perceived as color by the brain, or sound waves from a guitar. Evan has wondered if emotions are like that too—that they exude their own, usually invisible frequencies, and he can just _pick up_ on them. _Somehow._

But he does. And then his brain starts producing chemicals centered around someone else’s emotions, and soon he feels just as twitchy or light-headed or adrenaline-filled or heartsick as all of those around him.

So when Evan looks at Jared, right in the eyes, he can’t help the sweat gathering on his palms, the feeling of flying in his stomach, the jittery, blush-y feeling that Jared does _so well_ to hide. Honestly. 

And he can’t help but wonder.

There are a million thoughts running through his head. The words of one Alana Beck, a year ago, studying for a psychology exam:

_So, say a whole village of people were told a lie by someone, and that someone was the only person who knew that the lie wasn’t true. If belief is based on the fundamental idea of an absence of doubt, and therefore can also be parallel to truth, what happens if the person who knows the lie dies? There is now not a single person on the earth who doesn’t believe the lie. Does that make it true?_

Because what if Evan just pretends that the emotions are his, too? No one knows about the affinity but him, so what if he just pretends that everything is normal? It’s not like he hasn’t thought about it before—he’s known Jared for _forever._ It’s right there in front of him. 

What if he just takes this transmission of energy that he’s receiving and _believes_ it’s true. Does that… make it true?

He desperately needs something to be true.

Evan swallows. “I don’t know. You love Pocky? And it’s just coding, which you also love.”

He tilts his head in half-agreement. “Love is a strong word, but… yeah.” A pause, and he turns to look at the jellyfish. “So, what are they, if they’re not fish?”

“Uhhh. Oh god, I don’t remember. That’s an Alana question.”

“Right.”

Another pause. At least it’s Jared who came, Evan doesn’t really mind Jared’s energy. He’s so used to it that it’s almost as close as his own. 

And then another feeling from behind them, bright, focused, happy. Alana, through and through. 

“Hey Jared! Oh, hi Ev!”

“Hey, ‘Lana.”

They both turn to see her in her prim Aquarium polo and cuffed jeans, cerulean blue kicks, hair in a somehow both professional and casual ponytail. And Jared says, “Can you tell us what jellyfish are?”

“Oh!” She crosses her arms. “They’re a part of a subphylum, Medusozoa.”

Jared squints. “Ah. Medusa?”

“Sure.” She jerks a thumb behind her. “You gonna help me with this site? You can come too, Evan.”

“Yeah.” He looks to Evan. “You up for it?”

Evan smiles. “Okay. Why not?”

**Author's Note:**

> If you enjoyed please consider pressing that one heart button or the one that says 'comment' and telling me what your thoughts are! That always encourages me to write more! And thank you guys again for being very supportive of this AU! I've already started drafting the multi-chap fic! ^^


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